Yavena doesn’t stop, doesn’t pause, doesn’t think. Every breath is a transaction paid with someone else’s blood. Knife and kris glimmer, a charnel duet, keeping counterpoint with an orchestra of split viscera, opened lung.

Time empties of meaning. Yavena’s world contracts into muscle memory and offal, to reptilian instinct, to a single demand hammering between spasming ventricles. Out, out, out.

Around her, the Gak begin to howl.

Out, out, out.

Yavena traverses arrows and closing gates, past an artillery of talons and physiques made monstrous without the frame of protocol. Who knew, she pants in the red-black dark behind her eyelids, that the Gak could be so terrifying?

Out, out, out.

The howling deafens.

Release. Somewhere between impossibilities, Yavena crosses the final gate and hurtles into the blackness, her lungs boiling. She is barely Ovia at this point, only impulse and the appetite of survival, her body latticed with a thousand red scars. Into the jungle she flings herself, Iraline secure against her spine, and the last thought Yavena births before the Gak’s fortress becomes a memory is this:

Why do the warning horns sound so much like pleasure?

The Dog-King looks up from his chess table, smile light.

“Aaaah, Hahvak, you were right,” he breathes, attention swinging back to the smaller Gak sitting opposite the game board, face shadowed by a ludicrous cap. “Yavena is a runner.”

“I get to marry your brother now.” The little Gak relocates a bishop, his answering grin gleaming with teeth. “Your move, your lordship.”

“So many deaths just because you wouldn’t court him in public? Oh, the games we play, Hahvak. The games we play.”

Hahvak’s eyes are tar black, marrow sweet. “Checkmate. Do we have a deal, your lordship?”

“Of course. Set the board, will you? The new round awaits.”

She runs.

For weeks, for hours, for amoebic eternities, Yavena runs. Until her breath is splinters and her muscles rot. There is no respite, only shards of unconsciousness interlaced with days that will not end and ceaseless nights spent staring into the jungle’s teeth.

The journey is complicated by Iraline’s refutal of her rescue. The first time she wakes, the older Ovia screams, a thunder of rage and grief so loud that Yavena, desperate to circumvent discovery, poisons her with sleep. The second time, Iraline does not cry out, only flees. It is circumstance alone that allows Yavena to retrieve her, weeping, from the dark, Iraline’s ankle a mess of broken bone.

“You need to return me, sister,” Iraline hisses between gasps of pain.

“No.”

“Yavena. Please.” Iraline traps Yavena’s wrist in fingers made iron from desperation. “Please. You need to take me back. You can’t—the Dog-King. He will not forgive this.”

“No,” Yavena repeats and squeezes Iraline’s flesh, an exact application of cruelty that immediately robs the latter of her senses.